Strategic dynamic sourcing from competing suppliers with transferable capacity investment

We study the supplier relationship choice for a buyer that invests in transferable capacity operated by a supplier. With a long‐term relationship, the buyer commits to source from a supplier over a long period of time. With a short‐term relationship, the buyer leaves open the option of switching to a new supplier in the future. The buyer has incomplete information about a supplies efficiency, and thus uses auctions to select suppliers and determine the contracts. In addition, the buyer faces uncertain demand for the product. A long‐term relationship may be beneficial for the buyer because it motivates more aggressive bidding at the beginning, resulting a lower initial price. A short‐term relationship may be advantageous because it allows switching, with capacity transfer at some cost, to a more efficient supplier in the future. We find that there exists a critical level of the switching cost above which a long‐term relationship is better for the buyer than a short‐term relationship. In addition, this critical switching cost decreases with demand uncertainty, implying a long‐term relationship is more favorable for a buyer facing volatile demand. Finally, we find that in a long‐term relationship, capacity can be either higher or lower than in a short‐term relationship. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009     

Designing and pricing menus of extended warranty contracts

Extended warranties provide “piece of mind” to a consumer in that product failures which occur after the base warranty expires are rectified at little or no cost. They also provide an additional source of revenue for manufacturers or third‐party providers, such as retailers or insurance providers, and help cultivate consumer loyalty. In this article, we analyze a number of extended warranty contracts which differ in design, including restrictions on deferrals and renewals. With the use of dynamic programming, we compute the optimal strategy for a consumer with perfect information and determine the optimal pricing policy for the provider given the consumer's risk characterization. We also provide insight into when different contracts should be issued. Finally, we illustrate how profits can be dramatically increased by offering menus of warranty contracts, as opposed to stand alone contracts, with the use of integer programming. Surprisingly, risk‐taking consumers provide the greatest benefit to offering menus. These insights can help a company develop a comprehensive warranty planning strategy for given products or product lines. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009     

Optimal control policies for an inventory system with commitment lead time

We consider a firm which faces a Poisson customer demand and uses a base‐stock policy to replenish its inventories from an outside supplier with a fixed lead time. The firm can use a preorder strategy which allows the customers to place their orders before their actual need. The time from a customer's order until the date a product is actually needed is called commitment lead time. The firm pays a commitment cost which is strictly increasing and convex in the length of the commitment lead time. For such a system, we prove the optimality of bang‐bang and all‐or‐nothing policies for the commitment lead time and the base‐stock policy, respectively. We study the case where the commitment cost is linear in the length of the commitment lead time in detail. We show that there exists a unit commitment cost threshold which dictates the optimality of either a buy‐to‐order (BTO) or a buy‐to‐stock strategy. The unit commitment cost threshold is increasing in the unit holding and backordering costs and decreasing in the mean lead time demand. We determine the conditions on the unit commitment cost for profitability of the BTO strategy and study the case with a compound Poisson customer demand.     

基于大数据分析的网络管理智能化

军事通信网综合管理系统中,各专业网络运行情况的主要数据都可汇总到综合网管数据库中。这些网管数据中隐含了网络运行的几乎全部信息,但即使是最有经验的网络管理专家面对这些繁杂的数据也只能望洋兴叹。面对大数据的智能分析技术则有可能实现网络运行态势的高度可视化,充分理解和详细把握全网运行状态,像知识、经验、联想丰富的专家一样不知疲倦地对网络运行状况进行全面细致地分析,从海量的网管数据中发现网络故障的蛛丝马迹,发现隐含的问题,预知网络变化。论文介绍了利用大数据分析技术实现网络管理智能化的现实目标,基于性能的网络异常预测预报、基于性能和事件的故障分析诊断、网络运行知识的挖掘利用等方面的功能和技术途径。     

Value management of diagnostic equipment with cancelation,no‐show,and emergency patients

Magnetic resonance imaging and other multifunctional diagnostic facilities, which are considered as scarce resources of hospitals, typically provide services to patients with different medical needs. This article examines the admission policies during the appointment management of such facilities. We consider two categories of patients: regular patients who are scheduled in advance through an appointment system and emergency patients with randomly generated demands during the workday that must be served as soon as possible. According to the actual medical needs of patients, regular patients are segmented into multiple classes with different cancelation rates, no‐show probabilities, unit value contributions, and average service times. Management makes admission decisions on whether or not to accept a service request from a regular patient during the booking horizon to improve the overall value that could be generated during the workday. The decisions should be made by considering the cancelation and no‐show behavior of booked patients as well as the emergency patients that would have to be served because any overtime service would lead to higher costs. We studied the optimal admission decision using a continuous‐time discrete‐state dynamic programming model. Identifying an optimal policy for this discrete model is analytically intractable and numerically inefficient because the state is multidimensional and infinite. We propose to study a deterministic counterpart of the problem (i.e., the fluid control problem) and to develop a time‐based fluid policy that is shown to be asymptotically optimal for large‐scale problems. Furthermore, we propose to adopt a mixed fluid policy that is developed based on the information obtained from the fluid control problem. Numerical experiments demonstrate that this improved policy works effectively for small‐scale problems. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 287–304, 2016     

面向多核网络分组处理系统的线程亲和缓冲区管理机制

基于通用多核架构的网络分组处理系统性能受到诸如分组IO开销高、多核共享内存及进程调度竞争大、页表缓冲表项失效率高等问题的困扰。为此提出一种基于通用多核网络分组处理系统、面向高速分组转发应用的线程亲和缓冲区硬件管理机制,并在网络专用协处理引擎上实现。该机制采用无中断的线程亲和调度策略,将包含控制信息与缓冲区地址信息的描述符和分组数据按照分组处理的线程号链式地对应加载在多个地址连续的共享缓冲区中。基于通用多核和现场可编程门阵列平台进行报文转发测试,实验结果表明,采用线程亲和缓冲区管理机制能使平均报文转发处理性能提升12.4%,有效地降低IO开销和TLB表项失效率。     

Reserve forces and the transformation of British military organisation: soldiers,citizens and society

In recent years, there has been a sharp growth in political and sociological interest in the British military. Set against the backdrop of the armed forces’ increasing presence in everyday life, alongside the organizations’ ongoing restructuring, the current paper focuses on the MoD’s problematic attempts to recruit 30,000 reservists by 2020; what has become known as the Future Reserves 2020 programme (FR2020). We argue that these changes are driven in part by the need to cut costs in defence. However, we also suggest that they are a reflection of the changing nature of modern military organisation, and the manner in which armed forces engage with the societies of which they are a part, and with the citizens that make up that society. We locate FR2020 programme in the context of a wider narrative about the changing nature of military organisation in contemporary western democracies, identifying structural, circumstantial and normative reasons for change. We also examine the specific challenges of implementing FR2020 in practice, including issues of recruitment and retention, integration and support, and relations with families and employers, drawing on the experience of comparator countries to do so. We conclude by considering the implications of these changes, both for the future of UK armed forces, and for the evolving nature of military-society relations in Britain.     

Warranty claims modeling

A company wishes to estimate or predict its financial exposure in a reporting period of length T (typically one quarter) because of warranty claims. We propose a fairly general random measure model which allows computation of the Laplace transform of the total claim made against the company in the reporting interval due to warranty claims. When specialized to a Poisson process of both sales and warranty claims, statistical estimation of relevant quantities is possible. The methodology is illustrated by analyzing automobile sales and warranty claims data from a large car manufacturer for a single car model and model year. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

Dynamic inventory management with cash flow constraints

In this article, we consider a classic dynamic inventory control problem of a self‐financing retailer who periodically replenishes its stock from a supplier and sells it to the market. The replenishment decisions of the retailer are constrained by cash flow, which is updated periodically following purchasing and sales in each period. Excess demand in each period is lost when insufficient inventory is in stock. The retailer's objective is to maximize its expected terminal wealth at the end of the planning horizon. We characterize the optimal inventory control policy and present a simple algorithm for computing the optimal policies for each period. Conditions are identified under which the optimal control policies are identical across periods. We also present comparative statics results on the optimal control policy. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2008     

并行离散事件仿真中的DDM机制实现

在并行离散事件仿真系统中实现仿真模型间的互操作机制需要引入类似HLA中定义的声明管理(DM)和数据分发管理(DDM)服务.我们开发的KD-PADSE高性能并行离散事件仿真环境采用谓词断言和对象代理方法在面向对象的并行离散事件仿真系统中实现了基于平行结构和事件调度机制的声明管理(DM)和数据分发管理(DDM)服务.在以千兆以太网互联的10节点Linux集群计算机上,采用DDM机制后仿真模型每秒(物理时间)可以进行1万次属性更新,是没有采用DDM机制时的20倍,在功能性和性能上验证了该DDM机制在并行离散事件仿真系统中的适用性.